My wife is obsessed with Wordle. She does it every day, without fail. For those of you who haven’t experienced this online success, it is a game where you have to identify a five letter word and you get up to six attempts. Each time you fail you learn which letters are wrong, which are correct but in the wrong place, and which are correct and in the correct place. The best results she has ever had involved only two attempts and the worst (very, very rare) is that she doesn’t get the word at all. Normally it takes between three and five attempts. I have no interest in this game but I do see why Wordle is the most effective way to understand why success only comes after failure.
We are all afraid of failure. Failure in our personal or business lives hurts. It can be embarrassing, financially or emotionally devastating or just plain unpleasant, and this is why so many people and businesses will move heaven and earth to avoid it. The problem is though, life and business, like Wordle can only be successful after failure. In the game you have to start with a five letter word. The chance of this being correct on the first attempt is actually one in 2,315 or around 0.043%. In order to play therefore, one must accept that failure at the first or even second attempt is almost inevitable and yet according to a report in 2024 from CBS News “tens of millions of people play every day.” That’s tens of millions of people every day accepting that success will only come after failure, and may not come at all.
Effective people look at life and business in the same way that millions of people look at Wordle. They try something that will move them toward their ultimate goal knowing that the chance of failure is relatively high. They learn from that failure in the same way that Wordle players learn from their first attempt. Using that knowledge they then try again. Sometimes the third go will be successful, but this will often also be a failure. If they have learnt from their previous go it will be less of a failure in the same way as our Wordle players will end up with more letters correct, and in the correct place after go three than after attempts one and two. Ultimately all the letters will be in the correct place and in the correct order and success will be achieved, but only after a series of failures. Sometimes success will not come and one must wait until tomorrow to try again.
No matter what you think of Elon Musk, he is the ultimate player of “life Wordle”. When one of his rockets crashed in flames in front of all the world press he could have accepted defeat especially after being branded a failure. Instead, all he said was that they had discovered what not to do next time. This was a very expensive game of Wordle. There are many other famous quotes from people such as James Dyson and Thomas Edison saying the same thing. Most people are not prepared to accept failure in personal or business life and therefore never get to see true success. Effective people never say “failure is unacceptable” but accept failure as a part of the journey and so long as they learn from it realise it only hurts for a while.
One last thought before we go. In a world that changes as fast as the one we are currently experiencing Wordle gives us one more thing to consider. Just as you think you have cracked it, a new day and a new word comes along and all the letters get rearranged. Things are in a state of constant change, and in life and business the route to success as with the route to the new daily word are constantly changing and effective people change with them.
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